Eclectic Company: A Cappella

A few weeks back, my law school bestie (and former opera singer) came to town for a packed week of culture. She invited me and the POSSLQ to leap in and join her and some other friends for any of the events, but the only one that really took my fancy was the Carnegie Hall (in its smaller Zankel Hall) performance of The King’s Singers, an a cappella group of six male voices, originally (back in 1968) associated with the King’s College (Cambridge University) choral scholars. Their program was to include madrigals and various classical compositions, as well as some Broadway show tunes and other songs popularly referred to as from “The Great American Songbook” (that collection of musical theatre and film songs from the ‘20s to the ‘60s so popular with jazz musicians), so I wasn’t surprised that I went to meet her alone (The POSSLQ loves a cappella voices, prefers traditional folksongs but is more interested in the lyrics than he is in the music, and the show tunes he likes come from the musicals he’s known since he was a boy. So madrigals? That can sometimes be conceived of as formal folksongs (like when the lyrics are from folksongs, as they sometimes are). Nope. Not for the POSSLQ. Not at any price.)

I confess to loving all kinds of a cappella part-singing, from barbershop (who didn’t love hearing “Lida Rose” by the straw-hatted quartet in The Music Man) to doo wop (that rhythm and blues/early rock ‘n’ roll form of harmony singing featuring nonsense syllables and some very low bass notes) to church choir (New College, Oxford, where I went to graduate school, had a troupe of choral scholars and young boy singers from the attached primary school, who sang six services a week! at which they sang a different composer’s setting of the prayers for each Evensong or Sunday Mass. If you were a Princess Diana fan, you’ve probably heard them, singing at her wedding or her funeral.). I was friendly with some of the New College choristers, and memorably, was serenaded by a group of those guys who appeared at my 45th birthday “sheep and cake” party, rendering me absolutely speechless – I kid you not – with intense, abiding joy.

So I thought I knew what I’d be hearing at Zankel Hall, which is an incredibly live space perfect for unamplified performance (I sat in a few places around the room that night (the show was a replacement for one postponed following Hurricane Sandy, so some of the sold seats were empty of patrons who couldn’t make the alternate date), and the sound was crystalline and resonant wherever I was. But though I was prepared for a few hours of fine versions of some favorite music, I didn’t have a clue about The King’s Singers, who exceeded all of my expectations. The group includes two counter-tenors (David Hurley and Timothy Wayne-Wright), a tenor (Paul Phoenix), two baritones (Christopher Bruerton and Christopher Gabbitas) and a bass (Jonathan Howard), which is an unusual combination, but answers brilliantly how male voices alone can be made to perform certain difficult-to-achieve sounds. Their voices were exquisite, and from their first lush chord, the sextet held us spellbound, the spell broken only by thunderous and sustained applause at every pause in the music. Although it seems clear that this is the standard response to their performances – loud, continuous approval that led in this case to four! count them, four! encores – the personable singers who joked with us, and charmed with their brief explanations of the works we would hear, received our approval with becoming (and not exaggerated) modesty.

The evening began with pairs of madrigals, one in English and one in Italian, with some thematic or musical connection, by well-known composers of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, including Thomas Morley, Giovanni Palestrina and Edward Johnson, to name a few. If you haven’t heard one, a madrigal is a secular vocal music setting of a poem, often sung a cappella by polyphonic or contrapuntal voices (where lines of independent melody are sung simultaneously), and the works we heard that night were settings of sections of The Triumphs of Oriana (a book of madrigals written by numerous composers to honor Queen Elizabeth I using her nickname “Oriana,” each individual song ending with the couplet “Thus sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana: Long live fair Oriana”), that was modeled on the earlier Italian madrigal collection, Il trionfo di Dori, commissioned by an Italian nobleman, Leonardo Sanudo, in praise of his bride, the individual pieces of that grouping written by numerous composers and each ending with the refrain “Viva la bella Dori.” Between the pairs of madrigals, The King’s Singers turned to songs by Camille Saint-Saëns, Francis Poulenc and a modern composer, Joby Talbot, previously unknown to me. These classical works were so deftly woven together, and so brilliantly performed, that I think pretty much anyone would have loved them. But then, after the intermission, they sang my heart away.

Opening with Italian translations of some limericks written by the English author and artist Edward Lear, who popularized that form of poetry in Goffredo Petrassi’s work “Nonsense,” the King’s men moved on to “My Funny Valentine” from the Rodgers and Hart musical Babes In Arms, George Gershwin’s “Oh I Can’t Sit Down” from Porgy and Bess, the Judy Garland number “It’s A New World,” and Harry Connick Jr.’s “Recipe For Love.” At that point, the audience was out for blood, standing ovation after ovation, and practically forcing the group back onstage for encores of “God Bless The Child,” made famous by Billie Holiday, Airwaves’ (British prog rock band from the ‘70s) “You Are The New Day,” Albert Hammond’s “I’m A Train,” and Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes,” performed so simply that bestie and I were hard-pressed to name the song, repeating the lyrics “and so it goes / and you’re the only one who knows” over and over until it finally hit us. Ahhh!

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